Driven by distraction
John Tortorella Show can’t drown out bigger problem upstairs
This is exactly what the Flyers wanted from John Tortorella. This is why they hired him.
They knew the hockey team would stink. So, to shield themselves from the worst of the criticisms, they hired the one coach whose obsession with control and whose combative personality would be the story. They knew the chronic shortcomings of a team badly constructed by general manager Chuck Fletcher would be overshadowed by the chronic shortcomings of John Tortorella.
To distract from bad hockey and a bad roster they hired a coach best known for bad manners.
It’s going to get worse before it gets better. The Flyers have endured a 10-game skid. They started a five-game homestand Tuesday, and picked up a 3-1 win Tuesday against the Islanders, but they’re likely going to lose a lot more before it’s over — since the next three games are against elite teams.
But, instead of the recent train wrecks and the impending doom, are we talking about hockey? The continued absence of a captain, so Torts can rule the club unchallenged? Kevin Hayes, their $7.5 million center, getting demoted from first line to fourth line, and sometimes to wing? Their league-worst power play, whose ineffectiveness has helped the Flyers rank dead last in the NHL in goals per game?
No. We’re talking about Mean Torts. Rude Torts. “Hate list” Torts.
We’re talking about the guy who blew off a press conference on Nov. 10, the night he returned to Columbus a hero; then, when asked the inevitable question about why he didn’t fulfill that part of his job that night — a question no Flyers official had answered — replied, snidely, “None of your business.”
We’re talking about the guy who said Saturday on Long Island that he wouldn’t answer questions about individual players, including the ones who’d played well. We’re talking about the Torts who, when asked about a lifeless effort in a Black Friday home loss, replied, “No answer.”
We’re talking about the Torts who, at practice on Monday, said that he has told his players to swallow their outrage for the moment, and that he has what he called “My ‘hate list.’ ”
Tortorella said he’s keeping a “checklist” — a running diary — of slights, real and perceived, as the Flyers flounder. He cited opposing coaches deploying their players in a manner he did not appreciate. He cited the way games are officiated — often, in his eyes, to the benefit of the superior team. He vowed to take his revenge:
“When the time comes, and we get on the other side of it, that’s when you remember that.”
Robert DeNiro plays Torts in the movie.
That guy
Having Torts in your building is sometimes thrilling but it’s always exhausting. For all his acumen, for all his successes, dealing with John Tortorella and his Jekyll/Hyde personality can be like dealing with a 64-year-old fifth grade boy.
This is the man whom the Flyers chose in June to be the 23rd face and voice of their once-proud franchise. He preaches accountability, then shirks his responsibility. Startling? Hardly.
This was more than the expected outcome. This was the intended outcome.
We’re just 22 games into an 82-game season, and as the team continues to free-fall into pre-Christmas irrelevance, Torts will continue to short-circuit when it is his duty to explain what happened, and why. He will be derelict in that duty, as he so often has been in his 20-plus-year career.
Torts’ attitude isn’t a glitch. It’s a feature. The Flyers knew they’d be targets. Torts is here to coach, and to teach, but he’s also here to take bullets.
Walk around Philadelphia and you’ll see Flyers ads, but you know what you won’t see? Flyers. You’ll see Tortorella, and you’ll see Gritty.
It’s Tortorella vs. You
Tortorella won the Stanley Cup in 2004 with Tampa Bay, and he’s been to the playoffs 12 times, with the Lightning, Rangers and Blue Jackets, but he’s left casualties by the roadside at every stop. He’s been demanding, exacting, and inspiring on the bench, but he’s been rude, condescending, and unprofessional everywhere.
For anyone who gets a kick out of Tortorella’s temper tantrums: Don’t be a fool. When he acts out, he’s not raising his middle finger at the media. He’s raising his middle finger at you.
You pay him. The NHL mandates press conferences and locker-room access so players and coaches are accountable to you, through the press. We largely couldn’t care less, emotionally, why Morgan Frost has just five points in 21 games, or when Cam Atkinson is coming back from his “upper body” injury.
Every time Torts ignores a question, blows off a press conference, or demeans the questioner, it’s your face that he’s mashing in a pile of horse manure, not ours.
Sure, it’s more pleasant to deal with a predictable, respectful coach, but whether it’s gentleman John Tortorella or jerk John Tortorella, we get paid the same.
Torts’ act might be entertaining for a few masochists in this moment, but it’ll wear thinner and thinner. Consider: A franchise whose fan base is dwindling due to apathy and attrition hired a professional curmudgeon. For the cult of Orange and Black to desert you, you have to be a pretty damn rancid club. To that end: The Flyers haven’t won a Stanley Cup since Vietnam and Watergate, they’ve won just one playoff series in the past decade, and they’ve missed the playoffs three out of the last four seasons.
Tortorella is a fine strategic mind, and he’s a master manipulator, and he certainly knows what it takes to win in a sport weaponized by sharpened blades and wicked sticks and frozen rubber missiles that travel at 100 mph.
But there are plenty of fine hockey minds. There were none available who were as willing and as likely to absorb as much shrapnel from the imploding structure the Flyers have become under Fletcher.
The root problem
It was Fletcher, not Tortorella, who was hired a week after Ron Hextall was fired in December 2018, then proceeded to build a team so fundamentally flawed and so painfully thin that it cannot remain respectable when dealing with the injuries of this season and last.
The team doesn’t want its fans to realize that, much as the Flyers wasted the prime years of Claude Giroux, who should have been traded in 2015, they are wasting a year of goalie Carter Hart, whom they should trade before he costs them too much money. By the time the Flyers contend again, Hart will be Tortorella’s age.
That’s not Tortorella’s fault. He’s tearing things down to build back better. Fine. Trust that process, if you want. But don’t expect Fletcher to be its architect. Someone will pay after another season in the cellar, and it won’t be Torts.
It will be Fletcher. And that’s fine too.
He’s made this bed, and he’s hiding under its covers.
More accurately, he’s hiding behind John Tortorella.
Which was the plan all along.
Tortorella said he’s keeping a “checklist” — a running diary — of slights, real and perceived, as the Flyers flounder. He cited opposing coaches deploying their players in a manner he did not appreciate. He cited the way games are officiated — often, in his eyes, to the benefit of the superior team. He vowed to take his revenge.